Over the few weeks, as I try to finish both my semester AND preparations for next year's relocation to Paris, I hope to share portions of my (colon-heavy) talks and seminars: “Yvain's Herdsman, A Lion, and Several Dead Dogs: Rules for Being Human, and Some Ways Out"; “Unmaking Humans: Several Medieval Nonhumanisms”; and "Thanks Unending: Dindimus with the World."

An excerpt to start:

Works on animal rights very often uses the following description of later 17th-century French scientists of the school of Descartes, who:

administered beatings to dogs with perfect indifference, and made fun of those who pitied the creatures as if they felt pain. They said the animals were clocks; that the cries they emitted when struck were only the noise of a little spring that had been touched, but the whole body was without feeling. They nailed poor animals upon boards by their four paws to vivisect them and see the circulation of the blood which was a great subject of conversation.

But can I forget the pleasant conversation when this good lord closed the mouth of Monsieur Arnaud, as sophicated as he was? They were speaking of Descartes' philosophy, who was then the subject of everyone's conversation. Monsieur Arnaud, a true renaissance man, had joined with Descartes' system on the question of animals, holding that they were nothing more than clocks, and that when they cried out, it was nothing more than clockwork making noise. Monseiur de Liancourt [Duke Roger du Plessis] said to him, "Down there [in the kitchen] I have two dogs who daily alternate turning a spit. One of the dogs constrained to do this hid himself when they where going to put him to it, and he had recourse to his comrade [another dog] to turn the spit in his place. The comrade cried out and signalled with its tail that he should be followed. He turned up the other in the attic and reprimanded him fiercely. Are these clocks?" he said, which Monsieur Arnaud found so pleasant than he could do nothing else but laugh at it.

I'll just note that even here, under Descartes, human confidence could go awry: I'll leave it to you to decide how we should take Arnauld's laughter, whether he's tickled or nervous or unsure about what to think.

The ironies are almost too obvious to describe: though the Duke kept his dogs as machines, he knew them as having a sense of justice; though Arnaud beat and crucified his dogs, though he used them to study life itself—or to liberate “life,” whatever that is, from the body—he considered them, at best, puzzles to be solved.

[feel free to intervene on this translation, which is, admittedly, clumsy (and I hope at worst clumsy). There is, by the way, a recent edition (Champion, 2001) of the Fontaine, which I've been unable to consult]

4 comments:

More proof, I think, that the species line and the race line get inscribed in the same way ... and that evidence of injustice that travels across that line can sometimes cause a ripple, and often cause nothing at all.

although not precisely the same way, once we attend to the piece of meat on the spit the dogs turn. I'm still convinced that's amid all the intersections of nasty -isms, carnivorousness is the key point of difference for distinguishing discourses of animality from discourses of race and gender.